Many people especially in the UK will have heard and read about 24yr old Sheffield Hallam University student Richard O’Dwyer’sfight against extradition to the USA on a charge of copyright infringement over a linking site he made (TVShack.net) even though he has not been to America since he was 5 years old!

His mum Julia describes this as “The Fight of Our Lives” Richard if convicted in a US court could find himself in a Federal prison for up to 10 years and subject to a $250,000 fine. Though Richard and Julia are fighting against this disproportionate extradition and with no help from the British government who have rubber stamped Richard’s extradition, in reality hardly any British citizens have successfully fought extradition to the USA. You can find out more about Richard's situation by following Julia on twitter @jrodwyer and have a look on her blog http://juliasblog-the-fight-of-our-lives.blogspot.co.uk/

bzip2 - Compresses specified contents into a .bz2 archive or extracts from a .bz2 archive depending on parameters.

chmod / chown - Changes the access permissions of one or more files (chmod) or changes the ownership of a particular file to a new user (chown). Only users with permission or ownership of a file can change that file’s permissions or ownership.

cp - Copies files to a new location with a new name depending on the parameters. Can copy directories too, whether recursively (includes all subdirectories) or not.

find / locate - Searches the system starting at a specific directory and matching all files within that location to a set of conditions laid out by the command parameters. Very useful for quickly finding certain files.

grep – Searches through all of the files in a specified location trying to find files that contain lines that match a given string. Returns a list of all the files that scored a match.

install - Used in conjunction with Makefiles to copy files from one location to the system. Not to be confused with installing packages from a software repository.

mkdir / rmdir - Creates a directory (mkdir) or deletes a specified directory (rmdir). Directories can only be created and deleted within directories that you have permission in.

mv - Moves files and directories to another location. Can be used to rename files and directories by keep their source and destination locations the same.

open – Opens a specified file using the default system application for files of its type.

rm - Remove and remove directory. Used to delete files and directories from the system, whether one at a time or in batch.

tar - Creates a .tar archive or extracts from a .tar archive depending on specified parameters.

cd - Changes the current working directory in the command line console.

exit - Exits out of the current program, terminates the current command line terminal, or logs you out of a Unix network depending on the context.

kill - Terminates the specified running process. The Linux version of Windows’ “End Process” in the task manager.

ls - List all of the contents of a specified directory. If no directory is specified, it will use the current directory.

apt-get – Advanced Packaging Tool. Use this command to install, remove, and configure software packages on your system. For a menu-based version, use aptitude command. Available on Debian-based Linux distributions.

ftp / sftp - Connects to a remote FTP server in order to download multiple files.

wget - Downloads files from the Internet at the specified URL to your system.

yum - Yellowdog Updater, Modified. An open source package manager used to easily install software packages from repositories. Available on RPM-compatible Linux distributions.

emacs – One of the most well-known text editors on Unix-like systems.

vim - Vim is the successor to Vi, both of which are command line text editors for Unix-like systems. Though Vim is popular, it doesn’t use menus or icons for its interface so it has a reputation for being newbie-friendly.

date - Prints out the current system date and time. Specified parameters can change the format of the output.

df - Reports the disk space usage for the file system.

hostname - Displays the name of the current host system.

ps - Displays information about all of the processes currently running on the system.

quota - Displays disk limits and current disk usage for a specified user. Useful when there are multiple users assigned to a particular system.

top - Displays all of the top processes in the system, by default sorted by CPU usage.

uptime - Reports how long the system has been running since last boot. Extremely useful for servers.